


Everybody Pays

by Telaryn



Category: Firefly
Genre: Emotional Baggage, Episode Related, Gen, Headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-05
Updated: 2012-09-05
Packaged: 2017-11-14 16:17:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/517215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One Unification Day, Mal encounters somebody who makes him reconsider his black and white view of the war and its aftermath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everybody Pays

**Author's Note:**

> I refer to him as an "original" character and I guess in a way he is, but the singer in this piece is pretty blatantly based on [Marc Gunn](http://marcgunn.com/). I had the inspiration for this story during one of Marc's Gencon concerts a few weeks back, but didn't have the chance to get it down until now.
> 
> "Freedom Costs", the song Marc and Mal are discussing (as well as "Bring Me Home"), are real songs on the album [Firefly Drinking Songs](http://celticmusic.org/2011/firefly-drinking-songs/), and I heartily recommend any Firefly fans go out and buy the album immediately!

As Unification Days went, Marc had definitely survived worse. His first string hadn't broken until halfway through the set and he'd managed to work round it until the G had gone - forcing him to finish with no accompaniment at all. On the plus side of the sheet, it wasn't his best autoharp (because he wasn’t an idiot), and the liquor had been flowing freely enough that if he'd mangled the last verse of “Bring Me Home” likely no one had noticed or would remember.

Even the expected Unification Day bar brawl had been somewhat derailed by the stranger drinking alone in the shadows. He was still trying to parse that one. You got a few Independents in the bars on a day like today, and he’d had done his level best to slip a few songs into his set that might soothe their wounded souls. Typically none of them wore brown as openly as the man had tonight though; that had taken some heavy stones.

The guns had come out. It had all looked ripe for a mess of bodies and broken furniture, and he’d already eyeballed a hiding place for himself when...nothing. The stranger had abruptly seemed to decide the Alliance boys weren't worth a night in lock-up – he'd holstered his pistol and walked away. Marc had breathed a quiet sigh of relief, finished his set and gone to collect his pay considering himself lucky.

“That's not an Alliance song you played in there.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d been stopped leaving a gig, which was the only reason Marc was able to turn and calmly face the man from earlier. “Three of them weren’t by my count,” he answered – speaking carefully and praying that his suddenly racing heartbeat wasn’t as audible as it seemed. “Which one would you be referring to?”

The answer came to his thoughts as soon as he saw a flash of _something_ cross the older man’s face – he wasn’t surprised, therefore, when the man said, “Freedom Costs”.  
************************  
Every Browncoat who’d made it home from the war had a set of scars that weren’t visible ‘cept to others of their kind. Those who they were able to let get close did their level best to understand, but it wasn’t until you looked in the eyes of a stranger and saw those types of memories staring back at you did you start to feel like you weren’t alone in the world; that the time of war hadn’t been something you dreamed up after a night of bad food and too much alcohol.

Zoe thought he went to the bars each Unification Day looking for a fight to soothe his wounded pride. That was only part of it, but Mal couldn’t find the words to tell her that he needed to be near the aftermath so he could remember them who died. If the alcohol flowed freely enough (and if he was lucky enough) he could remember them as his friends, and not as the stinking rotted corpses they’d been when it finally occurred to anyone with any authority that there were survivors of Serenity Valley that needed dealing with.

He’d been prepared for the music and the out of control patriotism – what had caught him like one of Jayne’s heavier blows to the gut had been hearing _that_ song being sung by Alliance voices; stolen off the corpses of fallen soldiers and claimed as their own. And so, only half-understanding the demons that drove him to it, he’d waited to confront the singer – to set the record straight.

He definitely hadn’t been prepared for the man to confirm that he knew – he _knew_ \- and had sung it anyway. “Don’t it bother you?” he asked, struggling around the whiskey and the grief to change tracks. “Everything they took from us, and you sit up there and tell them it’s all right to act like they were the ones that gave up everything – they were the ones that paid that price?”  
****************************  
 _Don’t it bother you?_ If he’d had the luxury of indulging his feelings and his memories, Marc suspected it would. His family had given as much as any to the war, and he woke every day to a brother who’d come home in body, but not in mind. He wasn’t the one who’d made the decision to repurpose the song into some noble anthem of Alliance intentions, but when the audiences – who likely didn’t know any better – demanded it on a day like today he also knew what it would cost him to refuse.

Family pride sold cheap this far out from the Core, when he was the one best capable of putting food on the table and keeping the roof over their heads relatively whole.

“There’s not many that’ll play a pub on Unification Day,” he said finally – still unsure what he could say to the man that would make any of this okay. “’specially not out here. Barkeeps know that if they want someone who can carry a tune and handle themselves in a fight, they’ve got to pay fair and still most won’t take the jobs.”

“Why that song though?” the stranger asked, and now Marc could hear the grief in his voice. _57th,_ he decided, although he had no logical basis for assuming it. There were only a handful of regiments whose survivors held onto their hurt as deeply as this one seemed to. “Everything they’ve taken – you don’t have to give them that.”

“I didn’t,” Marc said – and suddenly he knew what he needed to say, even if the stranger couldn’t understand it. “I wasn’t the first, I won’t be the last, and you greatly overestimate the kind of influence somebody like me has on the world.” He blew out a quiet breath, trying to keep his own anger and grief at bay. “But every time I play those notes, every time I sing that tune it lets _me_ remember.” He gestured at the stranger. “And you. And them who weren’t brave enough to stand up and declare themselves openly.” Not for the first time he wondered how many of them there were like that, and how many had actually taken comfort from his songs over the years.

“And maybe if there’s enough of us,” he went on, “we start to take a little bit of the truth back for ourselves.”


End file.
